Green Beacon Solutions announced Tuesday that it has purchased MSC eConsulting, which specializes in deploying Epicor and other ERP solutions to midmarket companies. Terms of the deal were not disclosed and all assets of MSC eConsulting will be merged with Green Beacon Solutions' ERP practice.

The opportunity to purchase an ERP specialist was one Green Beacon couldn't pass up, according to Benjamin Holtz, president and CEO of Green Beacon Solutions, given the strong growth his company has seen in its 18-month-old ERP practice. In addition, many of Green Beacon's first ERP clients were already leveraging Epicor solutions, particularly in the professional services sector. "We began doing some Epicor implementations and began to receive lots of traction in the professional services industry, so the acquisition was a logical one," Holtz says. He was also impressed with MSC's business process-focused approach towards clients. "They're not just about the technology." All told, Green Beacon stands to obtain 45 new customers from MSC eConsulting.

The purchase also rounds out Green Beacon's service offerings, which before the start of its ERP practice, was focused primarily on CRM and marketing automation. "This elevates the company to a more balanced set of service offerings," Holtz says. The acquisition is indicative of how most CRM consultants are either expanding or retooling their service offerings as companies look to merge CRM with other back-office applications, such as ERP and supply chain management. "CRM is becoming a piece of the ERP puzzle, and vice versa," Holtz says.

Tighter integration with ERP and SCM software, the development and deployment of Web services, and the expansion of offshoring operations continue to drive the consultancy market. Additionally, the continued shift toward SOA will push clients to turn to consultancies, which, says Bill Band, a principal analyst at Forrester Research, are "staffing up to meet an anticipated shortage of personnel skilled in creating, integrating, and maintaining SOA components."